


Watch Over Me

by ninjamcgarrett



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Bonding, F/M, Feels, Fix-It, Haircuts, Post-Winter Soldier #14, brotp nat and logan guys it's super awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:49:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1487023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninjamcgarrett/pseuds/ninjamcgarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Winter Soldier #14, Bucky takes off to have his manpain adventures. Before leaving though, he leaves his apartment key with Logan and a request to take care of Nat for him. As the weeks pass, Logan helps Nat get back on her feet and rebuild her life. Then, one night, Bucky shows up at Logan's apartment. (Quite literally, a fix-it of sorts for what Nat and Bucky went through. Guest starring lots of Wolverine because who doesn't love a big protective superhero with a soft heart?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watch Over Me

**Author's Note:**

> I had to. The ending of #14 killed me. It's been a year since that issue came out and I'm still not over it.

Things would never be the same; Logan knew that from the moment Hill told him what that monster Novokov had done to Nat’s brain. To his great credit, he restrained himself from putting his fist – and claws – through any nearby windows. He stood by Bucky’s side as the former Soviet assassin, whose mind and body were ravaged by the same hands that had wreaked havoc with Nat, made the call to let it be. Logan held back the howl of rage at the heartbreak he saw in Bucky’s eyes. If he would ever willingly admit that he still had anything resembling a heart, Logan would have said it gave one lurching arch and then a snap when he realized Bucky was taking off, unwilling to stay and face the pain of a lover who didn’t – and couldn’t – remember him.

While Nat was still recovering on the Helicarrier, Logan went to the apartment she had shared with Bucky, in an attempt to stop him. He found Bucky standing in the living room, duffle bag at his feet and keys in his hand.

“You don’t have to do this,” Logan said, shutting the door against the chill of the hall.

“Yes. I do,” Bucky replied, not looking at him. “She doesn’t need the stress of me around while she gets back on her feet. It’ll be easier this way.”

“Like hell it will,” Logan growled, moving further into the room. “We need you here. Nat needs you here. You’re still the best team we’ve got.”

“Only because we had a history. We were so in sync that we could anticipate the other’s moves. That’s what made us great. Now it’s gone.”

Logan bit back a curse at one of his oldest allies. “You idiot” was what he settled for instead. “So that’s it? You’re just going to take off, like some freaking ninja in the night?”

Bucky looked at him then, his eyes subdued by the shadows. “There’s work I need to do, Logan – outside S.H.I.E.L.D. She got hurt because of my past. I’m going to make sure something like this doesn’t happen ever again.”

“One more kamikaze mission, huh?” Logan sighed as he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “I don’t know what’s worse – that you’re doing this or that I’m letting you.”

Bucky shouldered his bag and dropped his keys into Logan’s hand. “Look after her.”

“The apartment or Nat?”

One corner of Bucky’s mouth quirked up in a smile, the first in far too many days. “I’ll let you decide on that one.”

He clapped Logan’s shoulder before disappearing into the dark, barely making a sound as he went out the door and down the hallway. Logan looked around at the apartment that had once been home to two of his favorite friends. It looked sad and empty without Bucky’s presence. The man had done a good job covering his tracks, Logan thought, walking through the apartment; Bucky had removed any trace of his having lived there once upon a time before everything went to hell. His workout equipment, clothes, books, and photos were all gone. He had even rearranged the void created by removing his things so as to look natural, as if it had always been that way. When Nat came back to the apartment, she wouldn’t have to be faced with reminders of a man and a love that she had no memories of. Logan sighed and left quietly, locking the door behind him; none of this was right and he wanted to find the nearest punching bag to vent his frustration on.

A few days later, Nat was released from the medbay and allowed to return to her apartment. Thankfully, she did remember Logan – he wasn’t ready to admit how much it had scared him that she could have lost all of them – and let him drive her home. He stayed for dinner and helped her with a few chores like laundry and dishes since she was still moving slow while her wounds healed. Not all of her wounds carried a physical mark and stitches though, Logan thought, catching a strange look in her eyes more than once. The way she looked around the apartment, the question that was trying to form but couldn’t, the look when she saw the bed and knew that she had shared it with him, that man on the Helicarrier that she didn’t know.

“He moved all his stuff out for you,” Logan finally supplied when the unasked question was too much for him. “Took off for a while to give you some space.”

“That’s – good?” Nat responded, gingerly tucking one leg under her body while they folded laundry. “It would have been – strange – running into him right away, when it’s a total blank looking at him and he has all the memories and emotions.”

Logan grumbled then about trying to fold a button down shirt the right way and Nat smiled softly and took it from his clumsy fingers.

“It’s weird, you know?” she spoke after a moment of companionable silence. “You out of all the others know what it’s like to have your memory screwed with, have it taken away, against your will, do things you’re not proud of.”

“Hey,” Logan responded gently, reaching over to tip her chin up. “Don’t beat yourself up about that; none of it was your fault. It was that crazy-assed Russian and his machine. You’re you now and that’s what matters. But yes, I do know what that’s like – and it’s not fun.”

Nat leaned into his hand, taking comfort from the warmth there. “The gaps are what scares me the most. Whole years of my life, events, places, I don’t remember.”

“You’ll get them back eventually. Tony and Reed could have a breakthrough with the tech soon or maybe just time itself will bring them back.”

There was a soft sigh from Nat, the tiredness echoing in her eyes. “Here’s hoping. But in the meantime, I need to get my life put back together. And I don’t even know where to start.”

“Well, whatever you decide,” Logan said, standing and place a stack of shirts in a drawer, “I’ll be behind you one hundred percent.”

The smile that appeared on Nat’s face was genuine and she stood, giving him a hug. “Thank you, Logan, I appreciate it. Really.”

Not long after that, Logan shooed Nat to bed and crashed on the couch at her request, wanting another body in the apartment to combat the silence. Over the next few weeks, Logan saw quite a lot of Nat; he suspected that because of their shared history and his quiet manner that she found him most calming to be around. He went with her to the gym for her first workout, making sure she didn’t break herself or pop any of her stitches, and ended up walking away with a few extra bruises for going easy on her in their sparring round. He helped her rearrange furniture in the apartment, went with her for a quiet weekend of rest and escape at Tony’s place in the Hamptons, and even shared some of the crazy shenanigans he had gotten into during the seventies just to get her laughing.

It turned out that the nights were the worst for Natasha. Whispers and jagged edges of memories nagged at her subconscious, plaguing her sleep when she didn’t dream of her time under Novokov’s control and the blood on her hands. That first night she had called Logan and asked for him to come over, he hadn’t hesitated. When he had arrived, the circles under her eyes and the haunted look in them told him everything he needed to know.

They had a routine now whenever she called him after a nightmare: he would come over and make food for her (she had a partiality for pasta) and then they would watch old nineties sitcoms under she fell asleep, curled in a ball, head resting on his shoulder or feet in his lap. At that point, Logan would pull the quilt off the back of the couch and wrap them both in it before stretching out and falling asleep as well. In the mornings, he always woke alone on the couch with a cup of tea on the end table near him. Nat never said a word about the dreams or the way they would sleep on the couch together, but Logan knew her well enough to know that the tea was a “thank you” and the next time she called him was an “I trust you”.

Tony, Steve, Clint, and the rest of the gang soon realized that he was the closest person now to Nat and that he spent the most time with her. Whenever he was on the Helicarrier, they would stop him and ask after her, as she had spent time with them but never fully opened up with them the way she did with Logan. He always responded that she was taking her life back each day in bits and pieces, finding her way on her own once more. She was strong – they all knew that – and she would come through the other side of this with the usual aplomb and quiet grace that she always carried herself with. It didn’t keep the boys from worrying about her though; she was their Natasha, the calm glue that held them all together, and they all felt awful about what she had been through.

As the weeks passed, Logan wondered where Bucky – “that idiot” as he had started calling him – was and what cell of terrorists he was dismantling that week. Fury wouldn’t tell him anything except that “that fucking idiot” – as Fury had taken to calling Bucky – was alive and well, erm, as well as Bucky could be with his heart in pieces. Logan knew it was impossible to track Bucky, unless he managed to hack into Fury’s computers, and he also knew that Bucky would come back when he was ready.

Bucky always came back – from the dead, from the onslaught of memories after Steve broke through the brainwashing, from the Russian gulag, and from the dead once more. And each time he only came back when he was ready. So Logan bided his time and filled his days with Nat, who was arguably his closest friend. (And if she ever told anyone that he had painted her nails one of those nightmare nights for her, Logan swore he would deny it to the day he finally kicked the adamantium-covered bucket – even if it had been a rather deep and lovely shade of red he’d put on her nails.)

Between spending time with Nat and going on missions with the Avengers, four weeks passed before Logan knew it. He came home one night to a dark – but not empty – apartment.

“Wondered when you’d drag your sorry metal ass back here,” he grunted as he flicked on the lights.

From where he was seated at the dining table, Bucky laughed. “Stark’s the one with the metal ass, not me. You been drinking with Clint again?”

Logan flipped him the middle finger and moved into the kitchen with the sack of groceries he’d brought home. As he unpacked the vegetables and stored them in the refrigerator, Logan took in Bucky’s appearance. The former Soviet’s clothes were tattered and disheveled, looking like they had been to hell and back. Dark purple bruises were under his eyes from a lack of sleep, but the overriding pain and heartbreak was no longer evident in the brown depths of Bucky’s eyes. The rigidness was gone from his posture and he seemed – relaxed, at ease, if not great, then okay at the least. His cybernetic arm was missing, Logan realized, catching sight of the empty shirtsleeve; no doubt it had been lost on the latest mission and Fury was now building him one with even more tricks built into it. And most of all, Bucky’s hair had grown long and tangled, hanging forward in his face, reminding Logan of the length it had been the first time they had all seen Bucky this side of the twenty-first century.

“You need a haircut, Buck,” he finally spoke. “And you look like hell.”

“Gee willickers, Mr. Howlett, are you always this nice?”

Both men shared a smile before Bucky sighed.

“Nat was always the one to cut my hair, even in the Soviet days. She’s the only one I’ve ever trusted apart from Steve with a knife near my throat.”

Logan nodded. “Want me to drive you over to Steve’s for a cut?”

Bucky shook his head. “He’s in England for a few days running some mission with Union Jack and Spitfire.” He paused, his one hand fiddling with the frayed edge of his shirt. “Would – would you cut it, Logan? I – I can’t go back to Nat, obviously.”

Logan was shocked; he had definitely not seen that coming. Bucky and knives was a thing – everyone knew that, but Bucky trusting other people with knives around him was a whole other thing. He realized then that he now qualified for that list of super special people Bucky trusted completely, not just mostly. He swallowed the sudden lump in his throat and refused to admit, even to himself, that the realization produced a strangely warm effect in the region of where his heart was supposed to be.

He slipped out the middle claw on his right hand and held it up, his best shit-eating grin on his face. “Ready?”

Bucky’s eyes widened to the size of baseballs and then he laughed, a real, earnest laugh that had him doubling over and putting his head on the table while his body shook. Logan slipped the claw away and laughed as well; neither of them were particularly stellar with the emotional heart-to-heart stuff.

“No. Claws.” Bucky finally managed, wiping tears from his eyes as their laughter slowly subsided. “You got a pair of scissors around here?”

Logan nodded and rummaged out a set of scissors and hair trimmer from where they were buried in the bathroom. He thought he did pretty well at cutting Bucky’s hair, having threatened only once to give him a mohawk if he didn’t sit still because damn it, Logan did not want to have to explain to Steve how he accidentally shanked his best friend. That night, Logan made dinner for them – pancakes, of course – grumbling the whole time as Bucky mixed the ingredients and negotiated the addition of bananas and chocolate chips to the mix.

“How is she?” Bucky asked quietly at one point, as Logan spooned some of the batter out of the bowl.

Logan was quiet for a moment, thinking how best to answer. “She’s good. Better. Not as blindsided as she was when she woke up. She’s got a routine now and has rebuilt her life. Even painted the apartment – which she somehow coerced me into helping with that.” His voice grew softer then. “Nat’s going to be fine, Bucky. She’s getting back to her old self. She’s happy, mostly, and okay.”

“Nightmares?” Bucky asked, knowing full well the aftereffects of brainwashing.

Logan nodded. “In the beginning. I spent a lot of nights cooking for her and making her watch Frasier and Cheers. That seemed to help.” He reached over, gripping Bucky’s right shoulder once and then brushed a few rogue strays of cut hair from his shoulder. “I wasn’t about to let her do this alone, Bucky. None of us were. Steve works out with her every day and Clint actually started teaching her some of his crazy bow and arrow stunts, just to make her laugh. Tony comes by her place every now and again just to poke at her until she snarks at him and threatens to use her stingers on him; seems to do both of them some good. She and Thor go running in Central Park in the mornings – which, let me tell you, is a sight to see. And Bruce apparently uses his stress baking to make tons of cinnamon raisin bread for her.”

One corner of Bucky’s mouth tipped upward in a grin. “Sounds like a lot of team bonding time.”

“More like coping. We miss you, Buck. And we wanted to make Nat still feel welcome after what she went through, wanted to make sure she had a support system.”

It was Bucky’s turn to grip Logan’s shoulder then. “Thank you. For all of it. You took care of her when I couldn’t. I can never repay you.”

Logan grinned. “Careful, bub, next thing you know, I’ll be having you paint my claws a pretty pink as repayment.”

Later that night, after dinner and watching a few Mel Brooks’ films, Bucky had passed out on the couch. Logan quietly got ready for bed and then tossed a spare comforter over Bucky and shoved a pillow under the snoring assassin’s head. He turned in the doorway to his bedroom to take in the sight of Bucky, finally home, safe and asleep.

“And I took care of you too, kid. Don’t forget that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope this helped ease some of the pain from that issue. I love Brubaker's work dearly, but, ouch, that ending hurt. And I hope you guys liked the guest appearance by the pancakes! This also attempts to explain why the last panel of WS #19 shows Bucky sans-arms but with his hair cut. Thanks for reading!
> 
> If you liked this Bucky/Nat fic, check out "The Adventures of Rear Admiral Bucky Barnes" for adorable fluffy crack guest starring a rescued bunny. And for more Bucky shenanigans, check out "Soviet Sous Chef Bucky" - with lots of pancakes! If you're looking for a coda to the end of Cap 2/the ending of the Winter Soldier arc in vol. 5, read "If I Lose Myself" where Bucky finally finds Steve.


End file.
